Usheen in the Island of Youth by Thomas
Wentworth

The old Celtic hero and poet Usheen or Oisin, whose supposed songs are
known in English as those of Ossian, lived to a great old age, surviving
all others of the race of the Feni, to which he belonged; and he was asked
in his last years what had given him such length of life. This is the tale
he told:—

After the fatal battle of Gavra, in which most of the Feni were killed,
Usheen and his father, the king, and some of the survivors of the battle
were hunting the deer with their dogs, when they met a maiden riding on a
slender white horse with hoofs of gold, and with a golden crescent between
his ears. The maiden's hair was of the color of citron and was gathered in
a silver band; and she was clad in a white garment embroidered with
strange devices. She asked them why they rode slowly and seemed sad, and
not like other hunters; and they replied that it was because of the death
of their friends and the ruin of their race. When they asked her in turn
whence she came, and why, and whether she was married, she replied that
she had never had a lover or a husband, but that she had crossed the sea
for the love of the great hero and bard Usheen, whom she had never seen.
Then Usheen was overcome with love for her, but she said that to wed her
he must follow her across the sea to the Island of Perpetual Youth. There
he would have a hundred horses and a hundred sheep and a hundred silken
robes, a hundred swords, a hundred bows, and a hundred youths to follow
him; while she would have a hundred maidens to wait on her. But how, he
asked, was he to reach this island? He was to mount her horse and ride
behind her. So he did this, and the slender white horse, not feeling his
weight, dashed across the waves of the ocean, which did not yield beneath
his tread. They galloped across the very sea, and the maiden, whose name
was Niam, sang to him as they rode, and this so enchantingly that he
scarcely knew whether hours passed or days. Sometimes deer ran by them
over the water, followed by red-eared hounds in full chase; sometimes a
maiden holding up an apple of gold; sometimes a beautiful youth; but they
themselves rode on always westward.

At last they drew near an island which was not, Niam said, the island
they were seeking; but it was one where a beautiful princess was kept
under a spell until some defender should slay a cruel giant who held her
under enchantment until she should either wed him or furnish a defender.
The youth Usheen, being an Irishman and not easily frightened, naturally
offered his services as defender, and they waited three days and nights to
carry on the conflict. He had fought at home—so the legend says—with
wild boars, with foreign invaders, and with enchanters, but he never had
quite so severe a contest as with this giant; but after he had cut off his
opponent's head and had been healed with precious balm by the beautiful
princess, he buried the giant's body in a deep grave and placed above it a
great stone engraved in the Ogham alphabet—in which all the letters are
given in straight lines.

After this he and Niam again mounted the white steed and galloped away
over the waves. Niam was again singing, when soft music began to be heard
in the distance, as if in the centre of the setting sun. They drew nearer
and nearer to a shore where the very trees trembled with the multitude of
birds that sang upon them; and when they reached the shore, Niam gave one
note of song, and a band of youths and maidens came rushing towards them
and embraced them with eagerness. Then they too sang, and as they did it,
one brought to Usheen a harp of silver and bade him sing of earthly joys.
He found himself chanting, as he thought, with peculiar spirit and melody,
but as he told them of human joys they kept still and began to weep, till
at last one of them seized the silver harp and flung it away into a pool
of water, saying, "It is the saddest harp in all the world."

Then he forgot all the human joys which seemed to those happy people only
as sorrows compared with their own; and he dwelt with them thenceforward
in perpetual youth. For a hundred years he chased the deer and went
fishing in strangely carved boats and joined in the athletic sports of the
young men; for a hundred years the gentle Niam was his wife.

But one day, when Usheen was by the beach, there floated to his feet what
seemed a wooden staff, and he drew it from the waves. It was the battered
fragment of a warrior's lance. The blood stains of war were still on it,
and as he looked at it he recalled the old days of the Feni, the wars and
tumult of his youth; and how he had outlived his tribe and all had passed
away. Niam came softly to him and rested against his shoulder, but it did
not soothe his pain, and he heard one of the young men watching him say to
another, "The human sadness has come back into his eyes." The people
around stood watching him, all sharing his sorrow, and knowing that his
time of happiness was over and that he would go back among men. So indeed
it was; Niam and Usheen mounted the white steed again and galloped away
over the sea, but she had warned him when they mounted that he must never
dismount for an instant, for that if he once touched the earth, she and
the steed would vanish forever, that his youth too would disappear, and
that he would be left alone on earth—an old man whose whole generation
had vanished.

They passed, as before, over the sea; the same visions hovered around
them, youths and maidens and animals of the chase; they passed by many
islands, and at last reached the shore of Erin again. As they travelled
over its plains and among its hills, Oisin looked in vain for his old
companions. A little people had taken their place,—small men and women,
mounted on horses as small;—and these people gazed in wonder at the
mighty Usheen. "We have heard," they said, "of the hero Finn, and the
poets have written many tales of him and of his people, the Feni. We have
read in old books that he had a son Usheen who went away with a fairy
maiden; but he was never seen again, and there is no race of the Feni
left." Yet refusing to believe this, and always looking round for the
people whom he had known and loved of old, he thought within himself that
perhaps the Feni were not to be seen because they were hunting fierce
wolves by night, as they used to do in his boyhood, and that they were
therefore sleeping in the daytime; but again an old man said to him, "The
Feni are dead." Then he remembered that it was a hundred years, and that
his very race had perished, and he turned with contempt on the little men
and their little horses. Three hundred of them as he rode by were trying
to lift a vast stone, but they staggered under its weight, and at last
fell and lay beneath it; then leaning from his saddle Usheen lifted the
stone with one hand and flung it five yards. But with the strain the
saddle girth broke, and Usheen came to the ground; the white steed shook
himself and neighed, then galloped away, bearing Niam with him, and Usheen
lay with all his strength gone from him—a feeble old man. The Island of
Youth could only be known by those who dwelt always within it, and those
mortals who had once left it could dwell there no more.

USHEEN

In the original legend, Oisin or Usheen is supposed to have told his tale
to St. Patrick on his arrival in Ireland; but as the ancient Feni were
idolaters, the hero bears but little goodwill to the saint. The Celtic
text of a late form of the legend (1749) with a version by Brian O'Looney
will be found in the transactions of the Ossianic Society for 1856 (Vol.
IV. p. 227); and still more modern and less literal renderings in P. W.
Joyce's "Ancient Celtic Romances" (London, 1879), p. 385, and in W. B.
Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems" (London, 1889), p. 1. The
last is in verse and is much the best. St. Patrick, who takes part in it,
regards Niam as "a demon thing." See also the essays entitled "L'Elysée
Transatlantique," by Eugene Beauvois, in the "Revue de L'Histoire des
Religions," VII. 273 (Paris, 1885), and "L'Eden Occidental" (same, VII.
673). As to Oisin or Usheen's identity with Ossian, see O'Curry's
"Lectures on the Manuscript Materials for Ancient Irish History" (Dublin,
1861), pp. 209, 300; John Rhys's "Hibbert Lectures" (London, 1888), p.
551. The latter thinks the hero identical with Taliessin, as well as with
Ossian, and says that the word Ossin means "a little fawn," from "os,"
"cervus." (See also O'Curry, p. 304.) O'Looney represents that it was a
stone which Usheen threw to show his strength, and Joyce follows this
view; but another writer in the same volume of the Ossianic Society
transactions (p. 233) makes it a bag of sand, and Yeats follows this
version. It is also to be added that the latter in later editions changes
the spelling of his hero's name from Oisin to Usheen.